Gore Vidal, having lionized Timothy McVeigh in Vanity Fair, larding up his copy with his usual anti-Catholic bigotry, has now gone one step further. Speaking at the Edinburgh Festival, he has now asserted that McVeigh was actually innocent, that five others were involved in the Oklahoma bombing and that – of course – the FBI was involved. The point of the FBI’s bombing of American citizens was, apparently, to force Bill Clinton to sign an anti-terrorism act, which would strengthen the military-industrial complex in the United States. “Within a week of the bombing, Clinton signed it for ‘the protection of the state and of persons’, using the exact language that Adolf Hitler used after the Reichstag fire of 1933,” Vidal claims. It should be quite clear by now that Vidal operates in that netherworld of paranoia that is increasingly hard to distinguish from pure loopiness. Except that loopiness doesn’t begin to describe the malice that propels this literary lily turned rank.
BREAKFAST TABLE NEXT WEEK: All next week, I’ll be blathering on with Jonathan Lear on Slate’s Breakfast Table. Check it out on Monday.
The Dish 